Архидроид: управление электронной книгой с помощью мобильных технологий

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Перевод с английского Дарьи Поповой.

ARCHIDROIDE: DIGITAL BOOK MANAGEMENTVIA MOBILE OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES

Ahí están los jardines, los templos, y la justificación de los templos, la recta música y las rectas palabras, los sesenta y cuatro hexagramas, los ritos que son la única sabiduría que otorga el Firmamento a los hombres, el decoro de aquel emperador cuya serenidad fue reflejada por el mundo, su espejo, de suerte que los campos daban sus frutos y los torrentes respetaban sus márgenes, el unicornio herido que regresa para marcar su fin, las secretas leyes eternas, el concierto de orbe; esas cosas o su memoria están en los libros ...

J. L. Borges, El guardiàn de los libros, Elogio de la sombra, 1969

Brief introduction

During the last years we have seen the rising of mobile software technologies, both proprietary and open source, like iOS or Android.

This occurrence had of course interested operators and researchers working and researching in cultural heritage.

As usual they tried to find out what is good to make easier their job enjoying opportunities offered by the new media in several areas, e.g. Street Museum app from Museum of London, UK1, or Mobile GIS2,3 – and many others3,4,5.

The fallback of the adoption of new technologies should be hopefully the improvement of the quality of everyday job and very often saving time and money.

It is in this context that we try to contribute positively to the most basic library everyday tasks, realizing a simple and low cost system, called Archidroide , intended to automate typical methodological efforts in classifying books, cataloguing, sorting, managing or even preserving book assets in general.

The aim of Archidroide is basically to help librarians in managing the books in every operation usually performed in a library: insertion, borrowing and finding.

The system we realized, as described hereafter, is made up by several components deployed on the web – not only virtually but also geographically.

We intended to provide a modern solution but easy to be deployed and used.

According to our purposes this system is based on cutting-edge IT trends: the functional mixing of web and mobile technologies.

Thanks to those instruments user interaction with the program is entirely enjoyed through common mobile phones, equipped with wifi internet connection, allowing a decentralised control of system and its resources.

The first important result is that, on the contrary of the common practice, the system literally follows the user: i.e. the librarian can manage book collections and their state all over the library.

The application aims to help him in books insertion with an automatic book recognition algorithm and semi-automatic book form filling, allowing rapid collection of bibliographical data.

This data are than collected and linked to their actual position on the shelves of a library. A system for handily localize and show the position of volumes on a map has also been foreseen.

The most innovatory practical aspects we have conceived are directly based on mobile skills, e.g. semi-automatic ISBD indexing thanks to Optical Character Recognition, Barcode scanning and libraries, like the ones provided by the Google Books service , for matching ISBN's and bibliographical data.

The whole system, we are still developing, is released from the start under GNU GPL (General Public License), in respectful accordance with Open Source Initiative, and freely provided to the community. All the technologies, products and frameworks we use for implementing the software are open source.

The choice of using open source software is not accidental and it answers to a precise will: providing the community with a free tool based on free technologies.

System Features

We are going to analyze in a more in detailed manner how the application works and which tasks it aims to automate.

The library activities involved in the system workflow are mostly:

• •    book data catalogue management (i.e. insertion, editing, removing of book entries from collection)

• •    book data searching inside the catalogue

• •    book localization (i.e. physical identification within the building – or generally the library )

• •    books loan/return management

Each one of these tasks is completely controlled by the user through mobile devices (i.e. common Android phones).

The first task, management of books catalogue, concerns three different operations – insertion, editing and removal – performed by the user through the same mask.

It is here, affecting the insertion process, that we discover the first really interesting feature of Archidroide: the semi-automatic book data insertion.

When you want to insert a new book into your library collection you basically ask the software to recognize the book, scanning the barcode representing the ISBN (see Zxing open source library), usually on the back of each modern volume. It is our software that automatically, thanks to the scanned ISBN code, collects for you the bibliographical data through the internet and fills all the fields of your catalogue book form.

This operation is easily performed by the application getting the data from web bibliographical data databases, using freely available services like Google Books.

After this operation the user could check, accept further edit and save on their sake, the book form.

Editing and removal are not such interesting as far as they are simple basic operation without added value.

The second task, the book data retrieval, allows the librarian to search a volume within the collection by title, author, ISBN or subject.

There is noting strange in that but the possibility of searching a book by ISBN and the fact that all this operations are performed by handy mobile devices.

The third task, the book localization inside the structure hosting the library, is maybe the most interesting, innovative and experimental of the entire application. It allows the user to fastly locate the physical real position of the book they are looking for.

It basically shows the users where they are and where the book they are looking for is supposed to be.

This result is obtained because each book shelf or bookcase is precisely located on a map, populated by the system administrator and updated by enabled users.

After that the system uses both GPS coordinates and indoor-positioning techniques, according to library structure, for locating the user and suggesting the position of the shelf containing the book.

The last task is “book loan” and return management.

In our opinion this is another quite useful tool, in particular for its practical fallbacks on the daily practice of librarians.

It all is based on the use of different OCR – optical character recognition – techniques to ease the operations of book recognition, loan or return.

The book is recognized than by scanning its ISBN or by title identification through optical recognition of the frontispiece.

Users asking or returning the books are managed by the identification of their badge card that must be carried with a barcode – showing the id code of each library user.